Conclusion

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With the 845DC Series Samsung Electronics have launched their first enterprise-grade series of SSDs.  Samsung Semiconductor on the other hand is active in that area since a long time, generating know-how that can now be found in the latest drives launched by Samsung Electronics. In the case of the 845DC EVO Samsung created a highly, competitive priced drive for data centers, that features power loss protection (PLP). Other than that the drive is suitable for read-intensive environments. The reason why Samsung can push really hard through pricing is because of TLC NAND, that's being used but on the other hand this has a strong negative impact on endurance.

In terms of raw performance our test drive was able to score 437 MB/s sequential write and 542 MB/s sequential read throughput. When it comes to 4K IOPS we measured 87'500 IOPS regarding random read and 86'600 regarding random write. In case of sequential write the drive performs average, which is no surprise with a model made for read-intensive environments. With random read we see the SATA-III inferfce is being maxed out and therefore performance is where it should be. When it comes to random read IOPS performance we measured almost point blank the same Samsung advertises. On the other hand, when it comes to random write performance we were in for quite a surprise, since Samsung claims this drive can only do 14'000 IOPS 4K random write. We measured a whopping 86'600 IOPS. On another note we also had a look at performance with different queue depths as you can see on page 10. In case of random read performance we see 7'700 IOPS and when it comes to random write we see 37'800 IOPS (twice as much as communicated by Samsung). 

If you do as Samsung recommends and you only deploy thise drive in read-intensive environments, then you won't hit the advertised endurance rating of 600 TBW (960 GB model) within five years, which is actually the warranty period. 

Last but not least there is the pricing. The Samsung 845DC EVO 240GB comes with an MSRP of 249.99 US-Dollar, the 845DC EVO 480GB is recommended to sell for 489.99 US-Dollar and the 845DC EVO 960GB features 969.99 US-Dollar price tag. Price per gigabyte is therefore somewhere inbetween 1.04 and 1.01 US-Dollar, which is simply out of reach for competitors at this point in time.

Should you be looking for an enterprise-grade SSD, which can easily deal with read-intensive workloads, then we recommend considering this drive.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 8 - Random write IOPS
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 9 - Random read IOPS
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 10 - QD1/4/8/16/32 Performance
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 11 - Conclusion
Page 6 - Random write KByte/s

Authors: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch